Archive for Marketing Basics
PPC is “Not About The Ranking” - 7 Ways to Convince Your Client
Credit to Foraggio Fotographic
As the online marketing manager at SARBRO Solutions, I deal with some small business owners who advertise online. Often enough, they are in very competitive markets, where there are millions of searches a month, and the Cost per Click is between $2-$5. Similar to the “Rankings are Dead” argument Bruce Clay makes in regards to SEO, it’s not about the rankings, it’s about the conversions.
But it’s not only small business owners that have this misconception, CEO’s and others who are responsible for the budget, often have an ego issue, “why am I not number one on the Search Engines”? They will obsessively check their rankings to see if they are number one, convinced that their decrease in leads is due to not being in the first place on Google.
At one point, I was working at a company where we were spending a couple hundred thousand a month on Paid Search. At that point, while we were dominant on the search engines on paid search, our cost was consistently going up, and not only that, our biggest competitor consistently outranked us. The CEO was convinced that if we would be in position number one, we’d do much better. Of course, we adjusted our bid, raised it to $15/click, our budget burnt out by the end of the morning, and we spent an extra $10,000 on leads we could have gotten for cheaper.
The 3 Series Punch to Marketing your website and Blog
3 Steps - Credit to #freelance
Many people want to just start their online marketing campaign - be it SEO, Paid search or Social Media Marketing, without doing any previous marketing analysis. However it’s much more important to have your business plan down pat when you are marketing online, over when you are doing offline marketing.
To give you an understanding why, I’ll give you 3 different “case studies” with a lawyer who is trying to grow their business. They are an experienced attorney.
The Online Marketing 101 to Web Analytics - 3 Basic Ways to Use Web Analytics Tools
Web Analytics is a critical tool to understanding your online business. Whether you are simply running a blog, trying to generate leads from your website, or doing ecommerce, web analytics tools are critical to your success. So what can web analytics do for you?
- It can tell you what keywords the search engines find relevant to your website. This is a pretty basic way of using web analytics, and that is to see what keywords are driving traffic to your website. You can then decide whether to continue focusing on those topics that are driving traffic to your site, or you can decide to focus on other more relevant topics.
8 Ways To Market Your Music Online
- Credit To Jrossol
Being a musician - even an established label during the digital age can be a big challenge. When alot of music is being streamed online, or given away - or downloaded on torrents, you would think it’s even more challenging.
However, the opposite is true. There are many more ways to allow other people to listen and buy your music without having been already signed. You can sell your music digitally, and get up to 95% of what the revenue is. Your cost to create an album and distribute it is much lower. You can engage with users, and create fans without having an expensive PR team.
In short, it’s a great time. Although there is alot of opportunity, it can be overwhelming at times to create your online marketing strategy. So we’ve decided to give you one.
Market Your Business Through Referrals, John Jantsch
“I
get at least a hundred times the referrals now as I did before I had a
referral
plan.”
~ Scott Hensley - Affordable Concrete Cutting
Today
I want to share with you, in it’s entirety, a copy of a letter I
received from a small business owner who implemented a number of
suggestions I gave him in the Duct Tape Marketing book.
I chose to share this not to point out how brilliant I am - writing this stuff is the easy part sometimes
- but to showcase how acting on what you read - the really hard part - can payhuge dividends.
Personal Branding - an amazing interview with Joel Bauer
This is a heads up on an amazing 8 minute video of an interview Joel Bauer had on personal branding. I found it one of Ben Mack’s Blogs, and I was floored by the concept.
Joel really fulfilled his promise in the beginning of the interview…
Here are some of the points I took away.1) Personal Branding - make it count. Some of the things that Joel uses are… dressing in a suit, a unique looking business card, and a “USP” done right.2) The right way to do a USP… Focus on the customer, and what you are promising them. It’s not about you, it’s about the customer. For the show host it was a promise of emotion - or sorting out emotion. For the video engineer, it was “vision” etc.
A little Break - Great Post by Jeff Quipp…
To be honest, the social networking environment has kind of overwhelmed me. I try to keep my head above the water in the online “Wild West Fields” of Paid and Natural Search, and all the mergers, aqcuisitions and startups that happen daily. Add to that my new job - that of being involved in “branding”, when my background is in direct marketing online… social media optimization and marketing has been left behind.
Yees, I do have a twitter, facebook and linkedin account… I also have a dandelife account (too lazy to find the URL!) and many more… I have a stumbleupon, digg, delicious, and many other accounts… but I rarely use them… because I simply haven’t budgeted time.
BrainTease - What do Personal Branding, Corporate Responsibility and successful businesses have to do with each other??
What is the common thread that ties Personal Branding, Corporate Responsibility and Successful Business Models together? Yup brainteaser! Go ahead - comment here and tell me about it!
BTW- this blog is about business - so while it’s a bit about ethics, if you can master this, I believe you can build a successful business!
Alright, here goes my connection between all three. You prepared for a rant?
First what is branding from a business perspective? In a (couple of) word(s), branding a business is about creating a “persona” around a business. I strongly advise you to go read think two products ahead by Ben Mack - it’s a book essentially about using branding without the big agency budget (a good thing!).
6 Steps to Taking Your Marketing Team to Ultimate Creativity…
This week I was asked to present a marketing plan… Hehehe… I don’t think my boss was ready for this!
Some of the challenges we have been facing (my boss hasn’t realized) is that there is a large disconnect between our sales department and our marketing department… as well as our IT department… (creates alot of politics - god). My boss asked me to create a marketing plan for the team - and this is what I came up with.